Association Rule Mining

Association Rules and Frequent Patterns

Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms
Apriori
FP-growth
Correlation Analysis
Constraint-based Mining
Using Frequent Patterns for Classification
Associative Classification (rule-based classification)
Frequent Pattern-based Classification
Iyad Batal

Association Rules
A Frequent pattern is a pattern (a set of items, subsequences,
subgraphs, etc.) that occurs frequently in a data set.
Motivation: Finding inherent regularities (associations) in data.
Forms the foundation for many essential data mining tasks:
Association, correlation, and causality analysis
Classification: associative classification
Cluster analysis: frequent pattern-based clustering

First proposed by [AIS93] in the context of frequent itemsets and
association rule mining for market basket analysis.

Extended to many different problems: graph mining, sequential

pattern mining, times series pattern mining, text mining
Iyad Batal

Association Rules
An item (I) is:

For market basket data: I is an item in the store, e.g. milk.

For relational data: I is an attribute-value pair (numeric attributes
should be discretized), e.g. salary=high, gender=male.
A pattern (P) is a conjunction of items: P=I1 I2 In (itemset)
A pattern defines a group (subpopulation) of instances.

Pattern P is subpattern of P if P P
A rule R is A B where A and B are disjoint patterns.
Support(A B)=P(A B)
Confidence(A B)=P(B|A)=posterior probability
Iyad Batal

Association Rules
Framework: find all the rules that satisfy both a minimum support
(min_sup) and a minimum confidence (min_conf) thresholds.
Association rule mining:
Find all frequent patterns (with support min_sup).
Generate strong rules from the frequent patterns.
The second step is straightforward:
For each frequent pattern p, generate all nonempty subsets.
For every non-empty subset s, output the rule s (p-s) if
conf=sup(p)/sup(s) min_conf.

The first step is much more difficult. Hence, we focus on frequent

pattern mining.
Iyad Batal

Association Rules
Example for market basket data
Items={A,B,C,D,E,F}
Transaction-id

Items bought

10

A, B, D

20

A, C, D

30

A, D, E

40

B, E, F

50

B, C, D, E, F

Let min_sup = 60% (3)

min_conf = 50%
FP= {A:3, B:3, D:4, E:3, AD:3}
Association rules:
A D (60%, 100%)
D A (60%, 75%)

Iyad Batal

Association Rules
Example for relational data
Rule: Smoke =T Family history = T Lung cancer=T
sup (Smoke =T Family history = T Lung cancer=T )= 60/200=30%

conf (Smoke =T Family history = T Lung cancer=T)= 60/100=60%

Iyad Batal

Frequent Pattern Mining

Scalable mining methods: Three major approaches:
Apriori [Agrawal & Srikant 1994]
Frequent pattern growth (FP-growth) [Han, Pei & Yin 2000]
Vertical data format approach [Zaki 2000]

Iyad Batal

Apriori
The Apriori property:
Any subset of a frequent pattern must be frequent.
If {beer, chips, nuts} is frequent, so is {beer, chips}, i.e., every
transaction having {beer, chips, nuts} also contains {beer, chips}.
Apriori pruning principle: If there is any pattern which is infrequent, its
superset should not be generated/tested!
Method (level-wise search):
Initially, scan DB once to get frequent 1-itemset
For each level k:
Generate length (k+1) candidates from length k frequent patterns
Scan DB and remove the infrequent candidates
Terminate when no candidate set can be generated
Iyad Batal

Apriori
min_sup = 2

Itemset

sup

{A}

{B}

{C}

{D}

{E}

Database
Tid

Items

10

A, C, D

20

B, C, E

30

A, B, C, E

40

B, E

C1
1st scan

C2

L2

Itemset
{A, C}
{B, C}
{B, E}
{C, E}

sup
2
2
3
2

Itemset
{A, B}
{A, C}
{A, E}
{B, C}
{B, E}
{C, E}

sup
1
2
1
2
3
2

Itemset

sup

{A}

{B}

{C}

{E}

L1

C2
2nd scan

Itemset
{A, B}
{A, C}
{A, E}
{B, C}
{B, E}
{C, E}

C3

Itemset
{B, C, E}

3rd scan

L3

Itemset

sup

{B, C, E}

Iyad Batal

Apriori
Candidate generation: Assume we are generating k+1 candidates at
level k
Step 1: self-joining two frequent k-patterns if they have the same
k-1 prefix
Step 2: pruning: remove a candidate if it contains any infrequent kpattern.
Example: L3={abc, abd, acd, ace, bcd}
Self-joining: L3*L3
abc and abd abcd
acd and ace acde
Pruning:
acde is removed because ade is not in L3
C4={abcd}
Iyad Batal

Apriori
The bottleneck of Apriori:
Huge candidate sets:
To discover a frequent 100-pattern, e.g., {a1, a2, , a100}, one
needs to generate
candidates!
Multiple scans of database:
Needs (n +1 ) scans, n is the length of the longest pattern.

Can we avoid candidate generation?

Iyad Batal

FP-growth
The FP-growth algorithm: mining frequent patterns without candidate
generation [Han, Pei & Yin 2000]
Compress a large database into a compact Frequent-Pattern tree (FPtree) structure

highly condensed, but complete for frequent pattern mining

avoid costly database scans
Develop an efficient, FP-tree-based frequent pattern mining method

A divide-and-conquer methodology: decompose mining tasks into

smaller ones
Avoid candidate generation: sub-database test only!

Iyad Batal

FP-growth
Constructing the FP-tree
TID
100
200
300
400
500

Items bought
(ordered) frequent items
{f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p}
{f, c, a, m, p}
{a, b, c, f, l, m, o}
{f, c, a, b, m}
{b, f, h, j, o}
{f, b}
{b, c, k, s, p}
{c, b, p}
{a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n}
{f, c, a, m, p}

Steps:

Header Table

1. Scan DB once, find

frequent 1-itemset (single
item pattern)

Item frequency head

f
4
c
4
a
3
b
3
m
3
p
3
min_sup = 3

2. Order frequent items in

frequency descending order
3. Scan DB again, construct
FP-tree

Iyad Batal

{}
f:4

c:3

c:1

b:1

a:3

b:1
p:1

m:2

b:1

p:2

m:1

FP-growth
Method (divide-and-conquer)
For each item, construct its conditional pattern-base, and then its
conditional FP-tree.

Repeat the process on each newly created conditional FP-tree.

Until the resulting FP-tree is empty, or it contains only one path
(single path will generate all the combinations of its sub-paths,
each of which is a frequent pattern)

Iyad Batal

FP-growth
Step 1: From FP-tree to Conditional Pattern Base
Starting at the frequent header table in the FP-tree
Traverse the FP-tree by following the link of each frequent item
Accumulate all of transformed prefix paths of that item to form a
conditional pattern base
Header Table
Item frequency head
f
4
c
4
a
3
b
3
m
3
p
3

{}
f:4
c:3

c:1
b:1

a:3
m:2
p:2

Conditional pattern bases

b:1

p:1
b:1
m:1

Iyad Batal

item

cond. pattern base

f:3

fc:3

fca:1, f:1, c:1

fca:2, fcab:1

fcam:2, cb:1

FP-growth
Step 2: Construct Conditional FP-tree
Start from the end of the list
For each pattern-base
Accumulate the count for each item in the base
Construct the FP-tree for the frequent items of the pattern base
Example: Here we are mining for pattern m, min_sup=3
Header Table
Item frequency head
f
4
c
4
a
3
b
3
m
3
p
3

{}
f:4

c:3

c:1

b:1

a:3

b:1
p:1

m-conditional pattern
base:
fca:2, fcab:1

{}

f:3

m:2

b:1

c:3

p:2

m:1

a:3
Iyad Batal

All frequent patterns

concerning m
m,
fm, cm, am,
fcm, fam, cam,
fcam

m-conditional FP-tree

FP-growth
FP-growth is faster than Apriori because:
No candidate generation, no candidate test
Use compact data structure
Eliminate repeated database scan
Basic operation is counting and FP-tree building (no pattern

matching)
Disadvantage: FP-tree may not fit in main memory!
Iyad Batal

FP-growth
FP-growth vs. Apriori: Scalability With the Support Threshold
100
D1 FP-grow th runtime

90

D1 Apriori runtime

80

Run time(sec.)

70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0

0.5

1
1.5
2
Support threshold(%)
Iyad Batal

2.5

Correlation analysis
Association rule mining often generates a huge number of
rules, but a majority of them either are redundant or do not
reflect the true correlation relationship among data objects.
Some strong association rules (based on support and
confidence ) can be misleading.
Correlation analysis can reveal which strong association rules
are interesting and useful.

Iyad Batal

Correlation analysis
play basketball eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading
The overall % of students eating cereal is 75% > 66.7%.
play basketball not eat cereal [20%, 33.3%] is more accurate,

although with lower support and confidence

Contingency table
Basketball

Not basketball

Sum (row)

Cereal

2000 (40%)

1750 (35%)

3750 (75%)

Not cereal

1000 (20%)

250 (5%)

1250 (25%)

Sum(col.)

3000 (60%)

2000 (40%)

5000 (100%)

Iyad Batal

Correlation analysis
The lift score
P( A B)
P( B | A)

P( A) P( B)
P( B)

lift ( A B)

Lift = 1 A and B are independent

Lift > 1 A and B are positively correlated
Lift < 1 A and B are negatively correlated.
Basketball

Not basketball

Sum (row)

Cereal

2000 (40%)

1750 (35%)

3750 (75%)

Not cereal

1000 (20%)

250 (5%)

1250 (25%)

Sum(col.)

3000 (60%)

2000 (40%)

5000 (100%)

2000 / 5000
0.89
3000 / 5000 * 3750 / 5000
1000 / 5000
lift (basketball cereal )
1.33
3000 / 5000 *1250 / 5000Iyad Batal
lift (basketball cereal )

Correlation analysis
The 2 test
Lift calculates the correlation value, but we could not tell whether
the value is statistically significant.
Pearson Chi-square is the most common test for significance of the
relationship between categorical variables

(O( r ) E[r ]) 2

E[r ]

If this value is larger than a cutoff value at a significance level (e.g.

at 95% significance level), then we say all the variables are
dependent (correlated), else we say all the variables are independent.
Other correlation/interestingness measure: cosine, all confidence, IG
Iyad Batal

Correlation analysis
disadvantages
Problem: Evaluate each rule individually!
Pr(CHD)=30%
R2: Family history=yes Race=Caucasian CHD
[sup=20%, conf=55%]

R2 is interesting!
R1: Family history=yes CHD
[sup=50%, conf=60%]

R2 is not interesting!
We should consider the nested structure of the rules!

To solve this problem, we proposed the MDR framework.

Iyad Batal

Constraint-based Mining
Finding all the patterns in a database autonomously? unrealistic!
The patterns could be too many but not focused!
Data mining should be an interactive process

User directs what to be mined using a data mining query language

(or a graphical user interface).
Constraint-based mining

User flexibility: provides constraints on what to be mined

Specify the task relevant data, the relevant attributes, rule
templates, additional constraints

System optimization: explores such constraints for efficient

miningconstraint-based mining.
Iyad Batal

Constraint-based Mining
Anti-monotonic constraints are very important because they can
greatly speed up the mining process.
Anti-monotonicity exhibit an Apriori-like property:
When a pattern violates the constraint, so does any of its superset
sum(S.Price) v is anti-monotone
sum(S.Price) v is not anti-monotone

Some constraints can be converted into anti-monotone constraints by

properly ordering items
Example : avg(S.profit) 25

Order items in value-descending order, it becomes anit-monotone!

Iyad Batal

Association Rule Mining

Association Rules and Frequent Patterns
Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms
Apriori
FP-growth
Correlation Analysis
Constraint-based Mining
Using Frequent Patterns for Classification
Associative Classification (rule-based classification)
Frequent Pattern-based Classification
Iyad Batal

Associative classification
Associative classification: build a rule-based classifier from
association rules.
This approach overcomes some limitations of greedy methods (e.g.
decision-tree, sequential covering algorithms), which considers only
one attribute at a time (found to be more accurate than C4.5).
Build class association rules:
Association rules in general can have any number of items in the
consequent.
Class association rules set the consequent to be the class label.
Example: Age=youth Credit=OK buys_computer=yes
[sup=20%, conf=90%]
Iyad Batal

Associative classification
CBA
CBA: Classification-Based Association [Liu et al, 1998]
Use the Apriori algorithm to mine the class association rules.
Classification:
Organize the rules according to their confidence and support.
classify a new example x by the first rule satisfying x.

Contains a default rule (with lowest precedence).

Iyad Batal

Associative classification
CMAR
CMAR (Classification based on Multiple Association rules) [Li et al 2001]
Use the FP-growth algorithm to mine the class association rules.
Employs the CR_tree structure (prefix tree for indexing the rules) to
efficiently store and retrieve rules.
Apply rule pruning whenever a rule is inserted in the tree:
If R1 is more general than R2 and conf(R1)>conf(R2): R2 is pruned
All rules for which the antecedent and class are not positively
correlated (2 test) are also pruned.
CMAR considers multiple rules when classifying an instance and use a
weighted measure to find the strongest class.
CMAR is slightly more accurate and more efficient than CBA
Iyad Batal

Associative classification
Harmony
Drawback of CBA and CMAR is that the number of rules can be
extremely large.
Harmony [Wang et al, 2005] adopts an instance-centric approach:
Find the highest confidence rule for each training instance.
Build the classification model from the union of these rules.
Use the FP-growth algorithm to mine the rules.
Efficient mining:
Nave way: mine all frequent patterns and then extract the
highest confidence rule for each instance.
Harmony employs efficient pruning methods to accelerate the
rule discovery: the pruning methods are incorporated within the
FP-growth algorithm.
Iyad Batal

Frequent pattern-based classification

The classification model is built in the feature space of single
features as well as frequent patterns, i.e. map the data to a higher
dimensional space.
Feature combination can capture more underlying semantics than
single features.
Example: word phrases can improve the accuracy of document
classification.
FP-based classification been applied to many problems:
Graph classification
Time series classification
Protein classification
Text classification
Iyad Batal

Frequent pattern-based classification

Nave solution: given a dataset with n items (attribute-value),
enumerate all 2n items and use them for classification.
Problems:
Computationally infeasible.
Overfitting the classifier.
Solution: use only frequent patterns. Why?
[Cheng et al. 2007] showed that:

low-support features are not very useful for classification.

The discriminative power of a pattern is closely related to its
support.
They derived an upper bound for information gain as a function
of the support.
Iyad Batal

Frequent pattern-based classification

IG upper bound as a function of the support

The discriminative power of low-support patterns is bounded by a

small value.
The discriminative power of high-support patterns is bounded by a
small value (e.g. stop words in text classification).
Iyad Batal

Frequent pattern-based classification

The upper bound allows to automatically set min_sup based on an
IG threshold (IG0):
Features with support lower than min_sup can be skipped:
[Cheng et al 2007] Adapt the two phases approach:

Mine frequent patterns for each class label.

Select discriminative features (univariate).
Feature space includes all the single features as well as the selected
(discriminative) frequent patterns.

Apply the classifier (e.g. SVM or C4.5) in the new feature space.
Iyad Batal

Tree-based frequent patterns

[Fan et al. 2008] proposed building a decision tree in the space of

frequent patterns as an alternative for the two phases approach

[Cheng et al. 2007].
Arguments against the two phases approach:
1. The number of frequent patterns can be too large for effective
feature selection in the second phase.
2.

It is difficult to set the optimal min_sup threshold:

low min_sup generate too many candidates and is very slow.
High min_sup may miss some important patterns.

Iyad Batal

Tree-based frequent patterns

3. The discriminative power of each pattern is evaluated against the
complete dataset (second phase), but not on subset of examples that
the other chosen patterns fail to predict well.

After choosing the solid line, the dashed line makes the groups
purer (cannot be chosen by the batch mode)
Iyad Batal

Tree-based frequent patterns

Method: Construct a decision tree using frequent patterns:
Apply frequent pattern on the whole data
Select the best frequent pattern P to divide the data into two sets:
one containing P and the other not.
Repeat the procedure on each subset until a stopping condition is
satisfied.
Decreasing the support with smaller partitions makes the algorithm
able to mine patterns with very low global support.

Iyad Batal